Users decide Fedora 17 will be 'Beefy Miracle'

The users of the Linux distribution Fedora have voted on the name for the 17th build of the code base. The top choice? Beefy Miracle.

Fedora 17, due out in May of next year, is being named after animations built for the Anaconda installer in Fedora by one of the programmers. The hot dog pictures were designed for people who wanted a boot sequence that didn’t feature the Fedora logo, and have gained cult status among users.

In the voting for the name of the last Fedora build, Beefy Miracle was squeezed out by Verne – but this time it was a clear winner over second-place Liege.

Meanwhile, interest in the latest Fedora 16 beta is proving strong, and the Fedora team have added new features designed to make the system faster to boot and more suited to cloud and virtualization tasks. Jared Smith, project leader for The Fedora Project, told The Register that work was still going on to improve the code.

“Typically we just have the one beta, but we will have some release-candidate builds,” he said. “We’re making nightly ISO updates right now, and people are taking a close look at the release candidate.”

As well as including GNOME 3.2 – which has a new contact manager and better management of accounts – KDE 4.7 is also added. The GNOME team in particular have been addressing serious concerns from the user base – not least from Linus Torvalds – and the new interface should please traditional Fedora operators.

The code has also moved from using SystemV during startup, which assigns programs a numeric value for the order of loading, to Systemd, which can start multiple processes in parallel and can also be configured to load software in the order it is needed. The changes will lead to faster and more efficient boot and running times, Smith promised.

Virtualization and cloud support have also been beefed up, and the operating system will be supported by Amazon’s EC2 service at launch and Rackspace shortly afterwards, with other vendors also expected to support the code.